New M6500 Discussion Thread

They should make that stock given the pricing of the machine....I'm still looking at getting one.

 

I actually received a the M6500 three days ago.

Its for a ultra-detailed review for both the Precision M6500 and the 15.6" Clevo W860CU with the mobile Core i7's and high-end videocard modules.

I already fully dismantled it and put it back together... with full detailed pics (enough to make my own service manual).

Its a quite solid chassis thats is near Macbook Pro sleek-ness.

The main downside about it (for those that need to do upgrades, cleanings, re-application of thermal compound), its a pain in the butt to dismantle since you do not get full access to the main powerful components (CPU & Videocard) with the bottom panel or under the keyboard... you literally have to dismantle most of the notebook (about 3 dozen screws to account for).

Here are some teaser pics (from my site) of the M6500 dismantled:




now compare that to the cooling system of a 15.6" Clevo W860CU with the same CPU and high-end graphics.



the Clevo has a much better cooling system from my tests thus far.... and much better designed for user-upgrades (under the bottom panel).




the M6500 is slightly thinner and has the Quadro and FirePro options (but are proprietary... too bad, I was hoping that they would use standard MXM 3.0B modules)

.... more to come in my ultra detailed reviews.

 

Thanks for the pics. I'm really looking forward to your review!

 

Hi, thank you for uploading those images -did you mean that the video card doesnt look like this? http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_quadro_fx_3800_m_us.html

I just ordered one thinking that I could easily swap over the video card at a later point. Does this mean that I am only able to upgrade to the 3800m via Dell ?

Cheers

 

Does anyone know what SSD's are used in the M6500, they are 64 128 and 256gb in size so I guess samsung..

Anyone know anything more, revision etc?

 

"the Clevo has a much better cooling system from my tests thus far.... and much better designed for user-upgrades (under the bottom panel)."


It looks to me like the biggest difference in cooling is that the Clevo puts everything on the bottom of the chassis in a much more compact space. I would worry that it would be too hot for use without a fan cooled pad on your lap. With more space to work with and all of the bulk of heat production up top, I would think the M6500 would be more comfortable to use on a lap.

I am seeing each with 2 heat pipes for video, and 2 heat pipes for cpu. Not sure what the thin pipe is on the Clevo's video card. I think the Clevo looks more impressive because everything is copper colored. Look at how much the M6500 video cooling looks like a desktop card with the fan as a part of the heat sink. It is true that the video card on the M6500 has to share 1 one of its heat pipes with the cpu, but the fan they share looks like the largest in either machine.

The numbers will end up telling the story. I would be very interested in in chassis temperature after each has been running the same applications while each has been sitting on the same flat surface. The Dell XPS 1730 was praised for how much heat it could get out of the chassis, but gaming on one without a lap pad was something you did at your own peril.

I would also be interested in the temperature of the hard drives and batteries in each. It looks like Clevo and Dell both put them away from heat producing components. Heat doesn't matter to SSD's, but it shortens the life of platter-based drives. Heat is the #1 enemy of lithium ion batteries.

I look forward to your review.

 

I'm looking forward to your review also! -Would you be able to test/benchmark some games with it? -I know the GPU's are not ment for games -but it would be great to know that this laptop can run them well enough.

Cheers

 

I'm fairly impressed that he got some 1333 mhz with latency of 7. Most of the 1333mhz RAM I saw were were at 9.

This is older, but it still applies, as I was pointing out the fact that the higher speed RAM also tends to have higher latency timings. If you can get higher speed RAM with lowered latency timings, certainly, you should see greater performance increase.

http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2989&p=8

Looks like some nice work you've done on taking the system down, Gophn. Out of curiosity, what specs have you got the M6500?

 

the module in the Nvidia pages is a standardized MXM 3.0B module.

the module used in the M6500 is nothing like that... its very proprietary.... that means you will have to depend on Dell for the videocards.... which will cost an arm & a leg.

I have been using and testing high-end notebooks for a while now.

you are never supposed to use them on your lap, since you will be blocking the bottom vents and fan air intakes.

also, the M6500 gets noticeably hot externally (like the Macbook Pro) as compared to the Clevo notebooks.

 

Look forward to the rest of the review...I'm eyeing one hard....lol (I pass laptops around in my family